carrie gerlach
This novel is dedicated to Christian Van Gregg, who gave me the courage, inspiration, and skill to find my voice. His talent as a writer touched many people, but more important, his heart and friendship shined light on whatever and whomever he touched. If not for him, this book would not exist.
He was a friend of the right hand who lived for the perfect wave and the perfect fastball. A son, brother, and uncle. A love, a friend, a kid, and a man all wrapped in one. He was introspective, funny, intellectual, sexy, kind, and a true gift from above. His life will live on in his family, friends, work, and the work of the people he guided.
I miss him every day.
Table of Contents
Chapter one: Dr. D. The Coach’s Office
Chapter two: Keep It Out of the Office
Chapter three: Leave It in St. Croix
Chapter four: Don’t Go Pro
Chapter five: Gay/Straight
Chapter six: Arm Candy
Chapter seven: Never, Never, Never … Go Back
Chapter eight: Good-bye to a Friend
Chapter nine: Don’t Date Your Dad
Chapter ten: Smooth Sailing
Helpful Hints from Emily: INDEX OF REASONS
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter one
Dr. D. The Coach’s Office
I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t alone. I haven’t lost touch with reality and I don’t hear voices. I’m just having trouble concentrating on anything except the chiming of my ovaries. They’re a ticking clock, telling me the game is almost over. Time is running out. Ten … nine … eight …
Two men and a baseball player ago I was confident. Now I am feeling the pressure. I may be behind, but I’m not ready to settle for some random anyone, not ready for a life of loveless, overwhelming compromise. What I need is some good advice, the kind you don’t take chances on with friends or family. If they had the answer I would have heard it already.
I am a professional woman. I need pro counsel. Well, need seems strong. I don’t need anyone. I am part of the generation who got this far. But now, as if stripped of all defense and pretense, I find no comfort in this hollow independence. And these chiming ovaries are so loud that I can’t ignore them anymore. I’m terrified that someday soon the chiming will STOP! The buzzer will sound. The players will leave the field. And I will be forced to watch from the sidelines.
I’ll miss the chiming that drove me nuts and be forevermore reminded by the silence that I missed the life I once upon a time … wished upon a star … I’d have. I will be neverendingly tortured by the longings of a little girl inside who doesn’t understand why taxes, mortgages, and car payments won.
And that’s why I’m here, in this coach’s office, waiting for a man I’ve never met. I look from the framed Doctorate of Psychology across from me to the dog-eared House & Garden on the table and what do I see? A bridal magazine. I hear the blood rushing in my ears like the roar of the crowd. Why is a bridal magazine out here in full view? To torture me? Some twisted sense of irony? A warped form of inspiration? Ugh! This isn’t a party planning office. What the hell?
Oh, jeez. I’m picking it up. I can’t help it. Like a binge masochist, I am out of control, operating on pure chemical instinct here. Who is doing this? I scream from the cheap seats of my brain at the obviousness of this bad call. I’m flipping the pages. I’m lost in the perfection of the platinum-wrapped diamond ring sparkling at me on the page, the fairy tale incarnate. I am sliding my finger next to it. Mustering courage, I flip the page, only to sigh at the bride and groom kissing on a tropical beach. She looks so … so …
I hold the magazine closer, blinking rapidly … so much like me. Holy shit! What the hell am I doing in the magazine? I smile back at myself, a smile of the past, a firm and busty twenty-one-year-old fantasy version of me. I shake my head and look again at the photo, now of a perfect model type.
I guess I need therapy worse than I thought. I toss the magazine back on the table and quickly cover it up again. Am I kidding myself? Has the clock already expired? Is the game over and I’m the last to know?
I need a distraction. Something! A gentler, kinder Emily picks up the Los Angeles Times. I thumb through the pages and stop on the Calendar section, finding the horoscope. Libra: If today is your birthday, you are passionate, loving, and kind. Wear bright colors.
I pick at a loose piece of fuzz on my gray cashmere sweater. Your day will be filled with unexpected fortune, some good and some bad. Don’t tell intimate secrets to strangers.
Well, that would be great, except that I am waiting in the lobby to see a damned therapist. How am I not supposed to tell him my intimate secrets? That’s why I’m here. Or …
Is this a sign, my cue to flee? It is. Isn’t it? My pulse quickens. I grab my bag, take two steps toward the door, and hear the knob turning behind me.
I quickly backtrack, sit, and act natural as the inner door swings open and an attractive man in his early forties looks down at me. “Emily Sanders?” he says with a voice that sounds like warm T-shirt sheets, fresh from the dryer. I nod. “I’m Dr. Deperno. Come on in.”
I note the hardback books filling the shelves, the framed Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte on the wall above his large mahogany desk in the corner. No personal photos of framed family outings. He waits for me to sit on the plush burgundy sofa before he sinks into a black leather chair with his legs crossed, yellow pad resting on his lap.
I force a smile. He smiles back without saying a word. I smile again, picking the pale pink polish off of my newly manicured nails. The silence is consumed by a car alarm going off in the distance. I laugh nervously and wonder, When was the last time I did that? I can’t remember laughing lately. As a little girl I laughed all the time. Now, maybe, on my best day, three times, and usually just a chuckle at a joke e-mail sent from a friend.
“Tell me about yourself.” He pulls his glasses off his head and puts them on. I’m surprised I didn’t notice those. They’re small with tortoiseshell frames that complement his olive skin. I can tell that somewhere in his background a grandfather was Portuguese, Italian, or Greek.
“Like what? I mean, where should I start? Childhood? Adolescence? My twenties? What do you want to know?”
“Wherever you want is fine.”
Where to start? Where to start? I think as I blow my dried nail polish off the arm of the sofa, wondering if I should tell him that I feel as if my life is not complete, not a full circle, until I find the man to love me. How can that be? I mean, I am a perfectly self-sufficient woman, working hard to be all that I can be. Maybe I should join the army. Now there’s a decent place to meet men. The ratio has got to be better than L.A. But then, anything has to be better than here, where every beauty pageant winner is an eight in a sea of nines all wishing they were Julia Roberts, whom I saw the other day at Fred Segal wearing rose-colored sunglasses.
A cuckoo clock ticks. A damn cuckoo clock in a therapist’s office. Is that another sign of his sense of humor? If it is, it is not funny. Has it been five minutes already? Five minutes of silence. I want to say something. I want to tell him that my generation of women was raised to take care of themselves and that I have, for the most part, done just that—the best way I could in my twenties. Yet here I am, still single and searching.
I wonder if the search will ever be called off and I will pronounce myself complete. Just Emily. All alone. Oh God. That word. I want to claw it from the English language, ALONE, as in, adrift, without companionship, incomplete, a lone traveler, a donkeyless Don Quixote.
I want the married-with-2.3-children-tucked-away-in-a-beach-cit
y-with-a-picket-fence kind of life. This is what the oyster of my heart has been protecting, nurturing, and growing all these years. This is my dream, the sand at the center of the pearl of my life. In a panic, I am discovering what I must have known all along … The dream has an expiration date, and mine may be close to expiring and I can’t bear it.
I smile at Dr. D. and he smiles back, waiting, observing me like Pavlov studying a dog.
Dr. Deperno is one of the best therapists in the greater Los Angeles area. I’ve done my research. At least three people I know have gotten married after seeing him.
Although I’ve never been to therapy, I have read a ton of books on the subject, always it seems during the postmortem on some breakup to figure out where I went wrong. Books like If It’s Love You Want, Why Settle for Sex? or Men Who Can’t Commit line my shelves with more multicolored highlights than I ever put in my college communications books. I have perused every Cosmopolitan quiz for a decade, reading into them like a monk with a revered religious text. Is that all I’m here for? Another senseless autopsy of the soul, like Madonna studying the Kabala.
What have I learned from all of it? Only that I would rather have a career and be in a single relationship with a battery-operated device than in a coupled relationship with an asshole.
It isn’t that I have trouble landing a guy. I just can’t get them past the ninety-day trial period and into my real life, and I want to know: Is it me or them?
“How about telling me why you’re here,” he nods. “Then we can work our way around.”
I sit silently, staring at his face, trying not to feel awkward for $130 an hour.
Should I tell him the truth, that we are conditioned to believe there are men out there who will take care of us, love us, make us feel beautiful, safe, and sexy? Is the conditioning the problem, or the men? Is the problem finding them, holding them, or do they only exist in the realm of unicorn posters and straight Ken dolls?
“Is there such a thing as a stable guy who actually calls when he says he will?” I finally blurt. “Because too many years of the other kind has left me questioning the dream.”
He jots a note and looks up, waiting for more.
If you really want to dissect my inner workings, let’s slice into the men around me. Shall we? My father, who, “Mr.-busy-with-his-other-family,” I only remember through fragments, like the sight of a green golf shirt or the smell of Aqua Velva.
“Cuckoo!” The little yellow canary pops out and chimes in before disappearing behind the ticking clock.
“My father,” the hurt little girl tone rises in my voice, “left when I was six. I don’t hate him for leaving. If anything I am guilty of overloving and overwanting him. He was never abusive or unloving or anything. He just wasn’t there. One day it seemed he just decided he didn’t want to be my dad anymore.”
Dr. D. stares with these eyes that say he understands, maybe even cares.
It gives me a faux sense of comfort. The ice is melting. My thoughts begin to flow. “I was really young when I started searching for a man to love me. What this does to the female inner workings is incomprehensible.”
“Yes, but fortunately not irreparable,” he counters.
“I spent my twenties in relationships—overcompensating, forgiving, and basically trying to figure out how to make …”
I drift into silence. “Please, I want to hear,” he says.
Does he really? His eyes say he might.
“… trying to figure out how to make that one man … who left me in Mary Janes and white knee socks … come back home to love me.”
Dr. D. nods, peering from behind his frames. Somehow he keeps me talking.
“The funny thing is that at thirty, I am now friends with my father, closer than we ever were. But the six-year-old, the ten year-old, the eighteen-year-old girl inside is still waiting for her father’s love, for her ‘Dad and Daughter’ day freshman year. It’s as if I have some weird, empty space in here,” I touch my chest, “that I filled with Styrofoam memories learned from episodes of The Brady Bunch instead of real life. Sometimes I feel that if I could somehow fix those missing years I could figure out how to be lovable.”
He scribbles something on his pad, and I suddenly realize that I am uncomfortable.
Maybe I should have saved all of that for my second session, a little too much self-disclosure. Breathe. I take some emotional velocity off my backstory.
“I guess I’m dissatisfied with my personal life, my love life really.” I laugh nervously. “That’s really why I’m here. I mean what single woman in her thirties, isn’t? Right?”
“You’re dissatisfied?”
“Dissatisfied. Dissatisfied with dating.”
“Can you give me an example of how you’ve been dissatisfied?” he asks in a tone of voice that has a lullaby quality.
“Yeah, um, well …” My internal censor knows what I’m about to say and is already trying to keep me from going there. I take a deep breath. “Three months ago I realized that my boyfriend, Reese,” I look away from Dr. D., “who I fell in love with instantly, desperately, who I thought was the one … hmm, how do I put it?” I take a deep breath and look back at Dr. D., who is waiting for me to somehow sum up why I ran away from the one guy who I’m sure to this day was my soul mate because … because … I was dissatisfied.
“He had two cell phones. One of which I didn’t know the number to. It kept ringing and he never answered it when I was around. Do you see the problem?”
Who wouldn’t see the problem?
I can feel my throat starting to fill, the lump growing, my eyes tearing. I must change the subject away from Reese. Wow, I really need to save some of this for future sessions.
“I don’t know. Basically, I would just like to find a single guy who I like and who likes me back.”
Dr. D. is scribbling again.
“I am not alone in this, just so you know. There are an estimated forty-three million single women in the United States today … and thirty-five percent of us are twenty-five to fifty-five years old. That’s a lot of SSWs,” I pause, “single, successful, women, looking for love. We’re cute, funny, fairly successful, independent, yet love, normal guys, potential mates elude us.”
I try to read Dr. D.’s upside-down chicken scratch.
“The SSW was a good positioning statement in my twenties, but now, well, lately it seems that all my friends are getting married or are, at least, in serious relationships. That means that they are finding love and I can’t.”
I pause, looking for some sort of understanding, but he obviously doesn’t get a damn word I’m saying. Therapy, I can see, is going to be a joy. I should have gone to a woman. Although on the tactical side, a male might give me the missing edge, the insight into their psyche that’s been lacking all these years.
“I’ve been a bridesmaid seven times.”
“You have a lot of friends. That’s good,” he points out.
“Yeah, but they’re all married! Well, except for Grace and Reilly, but Grace is engaged. In November my best friend in the world is getting married. I need to have a date to her wedding. Okay.”
“Okay?” he questions.
“My friends are dropping like flies. My roommate from college has two kids and is leaving her husband. Kathy, Grace’s sister and my other roommate in college, just had her first child and they’re building a house on Gray Hawk Country Club in Scottsdale.”
Mothers. Wives. Homeowners. At what point did we stop chugging beers in college at Cannery Row, stumbling home and barfing long after we thought we were done? Now we’re supposed to be breast-feeding, going to Target and the PTA? Maybe it’s me, but I am obviously way behind on the learning curve, like a novice swimmer in an 8K, open-ocean race through heavy surf. I am drowning here, people. Drowning!
Poof! You’re a wife, a maid, a cook, a mother, a taxi. Your life, as you knew it, is over. No more sleeping in, shopping for Kate Spade bags, spa days, mashing with strangers. Before you kn
ow it, your breasts have gone from a 34C to a 34C LONG. Yet I yearn for it. For Tiffany baby rattles, an SUV stuffed with strollers, baby bags, offspring, and the comfort of a husband to spoon me at night.
Suddenly I notice the stuffed yellow canary pop out from the wooden clock. “Cuckoo!” Has it been fifteen minutes already? God, when was the last time I said anything?
“Tonight I would just like to sleep next to somebody I care about. Is that too much to ask?” I say, a little sadly.
“What kind of somebody do you want in your bed?” His pen perches above his pad as he waits to scratch something on it.
I look out the window at a palm tree blowing in the wind. “Someone over six foot. I have a six foot rule. With nice forearms and good teeth. Teeth are important. And maybe someone who likes to dance. Someone who stirs me inside, who gives me the ‘flutter, flutter.’”
“Flutter, flutter?” he repeats.
“You know? The ‘flutter, flutter.’ I get it right here.” I rub my belly. “Maybe it’s a girl thing?”
He obviously doesn’t know. This is a bad sign. He doesn’t understand that we, women, know within the first thirty seconds if we are interested in kissing, courting or having sex with a man. If he doesn’t know that about women, what the hell does he know?
I decide to level with him. “Anyone who thinks that women are somehow less driven than men by chemical instinct is deluding himself. We do not see past the potbellies and back hair, looking for nothing more than a seven series BMW, a three-bedroom house, and a 401(k). We want the guy that floats our boat. And what’s true of most women is especially true of me. I mean, if I don’t want to instantly press my lips onto that guy in the first, I mean first thirty seconds, forget about it. Call me shallow. Call me whatever. But if I don’t want to throw him on the bed and get sweaty and naked, it’s over. I don’t want a lifetime of financial security if the trade off is passionless kisses while dreaming of George Clooney.”
Is it possible to find a man who makes me hot, but who will still be a loving, loyal husband who makes me laugh? A provider and wonderful father to my children? Is this, too, a concoction of my preteens?
Emily's Reasons Why Not Page 1
